Had Mr. Kroot’s cat been in the cemetery again, walking over where her grave would be? Or trailing arthritically over Auntie’s two graves? Upstairs now, Minty ran her bath. She hardly ever had a bath these days without thinking about her money and how she could have bought a shower with it. She dropped her clothes onto the floor in a heap. They’d been clean on that morning, of course, but to her they smelled of Josephine and the litter-strewn street and the diesel fumes from lorries and taxis and all the cigarettes people smoked between here and Immacue and the butts they left on the pavement. She scrubbed herself with the nailbrush, not just her hands but her arms and legs and feet as well. The skin was bright pink under the water. Then she used the back brush. She dipped her head in and shampooed her hair, digging into her scalp with her fingertips. Kneeling up, she rinsed her head under the running tap. If only she had that shower!
As she was drying herself, another towel wrapped round her head turban-wise, something told her they were back. Not in here. To do her justice, Auntie wouldn’t bring a stranger in; she had her own ideas of modesty and Minty hadn’t been seen without her clothes since she was nine. They were outside the door. Let them wait. Minty used her deodorant not just under her arms but on the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands. She dressed in white cotton trousers and a white T-shirt with pale blue stripes. Both were “left-behinds” from Immacue, among those garments that their owners for some reason failed to collect and that, after six months, Josephine sold at two pounds apiece. Minty got a discount and only paid two for both. She wouldn’t have dreamed of doing it if they’d only been dry-cleaned but these were washable, had many times been washed, and the trousers she’d boiled, which reduced their size and made them fit better. She combed her hair, wrapped up her soiled clothes in the towels, and, drawing a deep breath, flung open the door.
They were outside, a couple of yards away in the doorway of Auntie’s bedroom. Minty touched all the wood she could reach, pink wood and white wood and brown, but they didn’t go away. Mrs. Lewis was much clearer and more solid today than Auntie was. She looked like a real person, the sort of old woman you might see in the street, coming back from the shops. In spite of the warmth of the day she wore a winter coat of dark red wool, a color Minty particularly disliked, and she had a dark red felt hat jammed down over her ears. So they could change their clothes wherever it was they came from, Minty thought, marveling.
Auntie, behind Jock’s mother and much taller than she was, appeared rather shadowy, something you only thought you saw and had to look at again to make sure. But she thickened and grew sharper as Minty’s eyes fixed on her. Minty remembered once, when she was a child, some relative or friend, it might have been Kathleen’s husband or Edna’s, who took photographs and developed his own film. It was Edna’s, she remembered now, recalling him for other mysterious, never fully understood, reasons. She’d seen him develop the film and watched the blank sheet in its pool of liquid gradually turn into a picture. Auntie was like that, growing from a vague shapelessness into a picture of herself.
Her arms full of damp towels and clothes, Minty stared at them and they stared back at her. This time she was the first to speak. She addressed Auntie. “You wouldn’t have anything to do with her if you knew what she owed me. Her son borrowed all my money and yours too, what you left me, and she could have paid it back; she had the time, but she never did.”
Auntie said nothing. Mrs. Lewis went on staring. Shrugging, turning away, Minty went downstairs. She put the clothes and the towels in the washing machine, started it, and washed her hands, thinking how she’d have held that stuff at arm’s length if it hadn’t been for encountering those two on the landing. Mrs. Lewis had come down behind her, but she’d come alone. Auntie was gone. Had she taken Minty’s words to heart?
Minty wasn’t going to eat her lunch with that old woman watching her. She’d rather starve. Mrs. Lewis moved about the kitchen, looking down at the cupboards and up at the shelves. If she was thinking Minty wasn’t a good enough household manager, wouldn’t have made a suitable wife for her son, she had another think coming. Everything in that kitchen was spotless.
Mrs. Lewis lifted the lid off the teapot and looked inside the bread bin. “She keeps it nice, I will say.”
“Say what you like,” said Minty. “I couldn’t care less. Why didn’t you give me back my money?”
No answer, of course. The old woman was close beside her now. Minty had a brilliant idea. She pulled open the cutlery drawer and seized the knife, the twin to the one she used in the cinema. The knife in her hand, she drew back her arm and lunged, but Mrs. Lewis had gone, faded into the wall or swallowed up by the floor.
It seemed then that just threatening got rid of them. But Minty didn’t immediately put the knife back. She washed the blade because she felt it was contaminated, though it had touched nothing. Then she carved some slices from a piece of ham and chopped some lettuce and tomato. The knife needed washing again and this time she put it right into the sink with plenty of hot water and detergent. It might be necessary, she thought as she dried it, to carry this knife with her as she had the one she’d used, find a more efficient way of carrying it, though wrapped up and laid along the side of her leg under her trousers would do. She poured herself a nice fresh glass of cold milk.
Her lunch was just finished and all the crockery in hot water when the doorbell rang. Laf, it would be, with the papers. “You want a cup of tea?” she asked, letting him in.
“Thanks, love, but I won’t stop. Where d’you think we’re going tonight, me and Sonny and you? We’re going to a show. In the West End.”
“In a cinema, d’you mean?” She wasn’t going back to that Marble Arch one, whatever he said. That was just the place Mrs. Lewis and Auntie were likely to be, haunting the spot where Jock had last appeared. “I don’t know, Laf.”
“In a theater,” he said. “It’s a thriller about the police.”
“Well, I can’t say no, can I?”
“Of course you can’t. You’ll love it.”
She wouldn’t be able to wear those clothes, that was for sure. Not after carrying those dirty towels and the trousers and top she’d taken off. Shame, because these white trousers were really nice. Anyway, she’d have to undress to put the knife down the side of her leg and once she’d got that far it was only another step to have a bath. She washed the dishes, took the papers outside, and sat in a clean cane chair she’d scrubbed, and with a cushion whose cover she’d washed and ironed. This made her feel very superior to Mr. Kroot and Gertrude Pierce, who’d stopped playing cards and eaten their lunch on the green baize table, sandwiches and Fanta by the look of it, for they’d piled up the dirty dishes on a tray and left it on the grass right by the cat’s nose, a real magnet for flies. Minty looked once but never again.
It would have been nice to go in the car, but Laf said where was he supposed to park? Down there, finding somewhere to put your vehicle was a nightmare. Taking the tube to Charing Cross meant you’d nothing to worry about. But the Bakerloo Line train was jam-packed and the streets were almost as bad.
Like many suburb dwellers, though their suburb wasn’t far out, Sonovia and Laf had only a sketchy knowledge of inner London. Laf occasionally drove through the Park to Kensington or even past Buckingham Palace. He knew roughly where the big streets led, while she had her shopping trips to the West End, and both, as inveterate picture-goers, visited the Odeon Metro and Mezzanine. But Sonovia had no idea of the way places linked up and couldn’t have told you how to get from Marble Arch to Knightsbridge or Oxford Street to Leicester Square. As for Minty, she hadn’t been down here for years, she’d had no occasion to come, and the big buildings of Trafalgar Square intimidated her with their rows of tall pillars and flights of stairs. It was as if she’d never seen them before or that she’d found herself transported to some foreign city. At the same time they reminded her of those Roman temples in the cemetery.